Participating Frequently

Question

How do I remove a blank link annotation?

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
December 13, 2021
2 replies
12273 views

Under the Annotations under my Content panel, there is a link that does not highlight any content when selected. It has an associated link objr under the tags panel. I'd like to remove this from my document. It's possible to delete the link objr under the tags panel, but the associated link annotation remains. This leads to a flag under the accessibility checker. How can I delete this link annotation?

This topic has been closed for replies.

M

Michelle243482146jck

Participating Frequently

I thought I'd offer a workaround for the "deleting link annotations" issue. It's tedious, but it works. You may want to save versions throughout this process in case you need to go back to fix something; these tasks cannot be undone.

PART 1: Force Acrobat to locate all untagged annotations (unusually these were created through Acrobat's Autotag process or Word's "best for electronic distribution and accessibility" PDF Save As process)

In Acrobat, select the Content tab.
Select the Options drop-down menu and choose "Find."
The Find Element dialog box opens. Select "Unmarked Annotations" from the Find drop-down menu. Choose the "Search Document" radio button. Click "Find."
Acrobat highlights the unmarked annotation with the Find Element dialog box still open. From the dialog box, select "Tag Element."
The New Tag dialog box opens. Select "Link" from the Type drop-down menu, and select OK.
Acrobat will automatically jump to the next unmarked annotation; repeat steps 4 and 5 until all annotations are tagged.
Save.

PART 2: Delete Links in the document

Go to the Tags tab. Be sure "Highlight Content" is selected in the Options drop-down menu.
All newly created, yet unwanted, <Link> tags should appear at the bottom of your Tags tab.
Select an unwanted <Link> tag. Acrobat will highlight its location in the document.
In the document, right-click on the highlighted link, and select "Delete Link."
Repeat for all unwanted <Link> tags.
Save.

STEP 3: Delete Empty Tags from the entire document and save.

J

JStroAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thank you for your solution. I'm not sure if my method is any less tedious. I extracted the page to reconstruct it without the blank annotations by transferring all the content to a blank page before inserting (not replacing) the reconstructed page back in to its appropriate position in the document. If there were internal links/references, this method requires correcting all the broken links throughout the document.

I've found that transferring over the content is possible by creating a new PDF with a blank page and then inserting the extracted page with the content to be transferred to follow. Then, in the Content panel, cut all the content from the second page and paste it to the first.

M

Michelle243482146jck

Participating Frequently

That's a clever solution as well! My issues tend to pop up in longer documents (over 20 pages), and the link issue might appear on every page. I'm remediating a ton of scanned archival documents that require OCR; the links issue has been popping up often when the original scan has a hyperlink in the should-be-artifact footer. *face palm*

ls_rbls

Community Expert

can you share a screenshot of what you see ?

Seems like you're referring to a weblink of a documen link, in which case you may need to employ the "Edit PDF" tool.

When you open this tool, a toolbar will appear; select the "Link" item , then select from the context menu "Remove Weblinks..."

J

JStroAuthor

Participating Frequently

In this first image, the link--which is unfortunately not a weblink but an internal-facing link that directs to another page--creates a highlight as intended and the associated link annotation. I've redacted the text, but the regular text is in black and the linked text in violet:

In this second image, the second link annotation does not show a highlight. Without the highlighted box, I'm unable to choose to edit or delete the link and link annotation:

In this third image, the third link annotation is associated with a highlight over the second linked text.

Each of the link annotations are also associated with a link objr in the tags panel. What I'd like to do is delete the second link annotation that isn't associated with linked text in the document and that doesn't create a highlight.

If it helps, the original document was created in Word, which was converted to PDF.

J

JStroAuthor

Participating Frequently

See if this helps:

Before you create a PDF from MS Word, try and turn off the "Document structure tags for accessibility" options, then convert to PDF.

The main detail here is if you're using "Save As" a pdf document, print to pdf, or converting to PDF directly using the Adobe Acrobat add-in; the results of the produced PDF may vary using those methods.

Can you confirm which of these methods were you using?

Also, I am curious now, would you be able to share an example of that PDF with no sensitive data on it?

Ah, yes. I understand. I didn't print to PDF or Save As. I converted to PDF using the Adobe Acrobat add-in. I've created a sample PDF out of the document to try to illustrate the issue.

What does turning off the "Document structure tags for accessibility" option do? My goal is to make this document accessible and to run cleanly through the built-in accessiblity checker. It is general practice in document remediation for accessibility for there to only be a single link objr per link tag under the tags panel. If I delete the link objrs that are blank, the accessibility checker indicates there's an issue because there are unmarked link annotations that are no longer associated with the deleted link objrs in the tags panel.

Sample.pdf

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